Chapter Text
Steve drummed his fingers on the arm of the plastic chair, reminding himself—as he had many times over the past several hours—that patience was a virtue. Tony was going to be fine, and Steve would see him soon enough.
He’d been assured that Sam, Natasha, Barton, and Tony’s friend Colonel Rhodes, along with what remained of SHIELD, were capably handling the shut-down of the Hydra base and the confiscation of all of Tony’s newly-invented technology. Steve had wanted to go, but SHIELD Medical had first insisted on checking him for signs of continued obedience to Hydra (understandably), then on treating his fractured skull and the lattice of healing cuts that covered his chest (less understandably—the super soldier serum would take care of all of it). Sam and the others had promised to call him if his capabilities were needed, but the few brief updates he’d gotten made it sound like Hydra hadn’t known what had hit them.
Steve might have been more frustrated at being benched if Tony hadn’t spent a horrifying hour in critical condition with a punctured lung, and another five in a surgery that was apparently complicated by the scar tissue spread throughout his lungs. Yet another thing Steve was hearing about for the first time. Steve had drawn both sympathetic and horrified stares when he’d explained patiently to the doctors nursing staff that he’d caused the initial damage to Stark’s ribs, nine fractures and two breaks, with his fists alone.
Agonizing as it was to wait, the surgery had gone fine and Stark had been moved to a private room a few minutes earlier.
Pepper was visiting Tony now, and Steve had elected to give them their space. He thought their relationship had ended recently—something about the suits, and Tony building them against her wishes. He didn’t really know. Whatever the case, it wasn’t his place to intrude. She had known him for far longer, after all.
That thought did little to assuage his restlessness. He’d had enough of waiting helplessly to last a lifetime. He needed to see for himself that Tony was going to recover, and more than that, he needed to make things right. He’d failed Tony in too many ways.
Finally, the door clicked open and Pepper exited, tired but relieved. “He’s ready for you.” Steve’s expression must have showed more alarm than he’d intended at the ambiguous phrase, because she smiled and added, “I mean, he wants to see you. He kept asking about you and I think he just kicked me out.”
“Oh,” Steve said. “Well, thank you, ma’am.”
Pepper disappeared down the hallway and Steve walked into the room slowly. His mind was simultaneously racing and blank. He had so much to beg forgiveness for—from letting them get taken in the first place to hurting Tony, again and again and again, to failing to see that Hydra had been manipulating him all along—but no idea where to start. And then, there was Tony’s confession, that admission to deeper feeling for Steve and a desire to have more than they had. Whatever that meant. Not to mention the other concerning things Steve had learned—that Tony suffered from shell shock, that he thought his own life worth so little. It was impossible to know where to start.
Lying on the bed, surrounded by alien-looking medical instruments, Tony looked pale and small—and for a moment Steve thought he finally understood why Bucky and his ma had always seemed so worried about him after something put him in a bed like that. Tony looked so… vulnerable.
“Hey,” Steve said, smiling through the tightness in his own chest.
Tony brightened at seeing him before a guarded expression slipped over his features. “Hey, Cap,” he said hoarsely. “How’s the head?”
Steve unconsciously reached up to the small bandage still covering his temple, not as surprised as he might once have been that that was Tony’s first question. The headache he’d been steadfastly ignoring since the rescue throbbed harder. “It’s fine.”
“Skull fracture, huh,” Tony said, the guilt in his voice belying his causal words. “My bad.”
“It’s fine. Really. How are you feel—” Steve started to ask, then stopped himself and amended, “Has the truth serum worn off yet?”
“Yeah, thank God,” Tony said. “Check this out: I’m the pope. My mother’s name was Barack Obama. I love hospitals. I’m having a secret love affair with Thor, but he still won’t tell me the secret to his beautiful magazine cover hair. But, ah… thanks for checking. Better late than never.”
“Of course, Tony,” Steve said, tentatively taking a seat in the plastic chair by Tony’s bed. While Steve was fairly sure he’d had enough of plastic hospital chairs to last several lifetimes, he didn’t like looming over Tony when Tony looked so small. Tony’s eyes followed him, though he winced when he tried to turn his head.
“Normally I’d be on a lot of the good stuff right now, but I didn’t feel like trading one truth serum for another, least not until I saw you,” Tony said, apparently seeing the concern on Steve’s face as need for an explanation. “Some local anesthetics, but I wanted my head clear. How about you? Done being Hydra’s little marionette?”
Steve pursed his lips, thinking about how easily the colorful phrasing would have gotten under his skin not so long ago. But there was real concern in Tony’s voice, and he answered that instead. “I’m free of it. Apparently cognitive recalibration worked just as well for me as it did for Barton.”
“Good,” Tony said seriously.
Steve nodded, the pounding in his head increasing slightly with the movement. It only served to remind him how easily he’d gotten off. He’d be back to normal in a few weeks. Tony was looking at months of painful recuperation.
“I’m sorry,” Steve blurted at the same time as Tony said, “Steve—”
They looked at each other.
“Uh, go ahead,” Steve said, his cheeks heating for some reason. Talking to Tony had always been difficult, but only because he only understood half of what came out of his mouth and the other half seemed intentionally aimed at annoying him. This was very different, but not much easier.
Tony takes a shallow breath, “No, it’s fine, you go.”
Because Steve was bursting to apologize, he took the invitation without being asked again. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “For everything, Tony. I should have protected you. I should never have let them get to me in the first place, and once they had, I should have done a better job of making sure that you didn’t get hurt because of it. I know you can handle yourself in the suit, but out of it, your safety is my responsibility, and I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I’m sorry I let Hydra play me.” The thought of it made something familiar and acidic and bitter burn its way up from his gut to leave an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
A silence fell after he stopped talking, and for a horrible few moments Steve was convinced that it wasn’t enough, and Tony was trying to figure out how best to ask him to leave.
Instead, Tony just let out a shallow breath and said, in a tone that suggested Steve was maybe a little stupid, “None of that was your fault, Cap.”
“It was,” Steve said, needing Tony to believe it. If Tony didn’t believe it, he could never forgive Steve for what he’d done.
“Come on. Pretty sure being mind-controlled means you get a get-out-of-jail free card when it comes to responsibility,” Tony said lightly.
“Never liked Monopoly,” Steve said.
Tony rolled his eyes. “Of course you didn’t. Point is, none of this is your fault. No way, no how. Plus, what with the whole you fighting your way out past an entire Hydra base with a cracked skull to save my life, I’m pretty sure I owe you one.”
“I hurt you,” Steve said, looking down reflexively at his hands. It had taken a while to clean the blood all the way off his knuckles.
“Cap,” Tony said, his voice softening. “I don’t blame you. Through all that—I never blamed you. Never stopped trusting you, even. God, I probably would have built the suits for them anyway if I thought it meant saving your life. I wasn’t really acting, there.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Steve said. “After all I—“
“Wasn’t you,” Tony cut him off curtly.
Steve opened his mouth, then closed it. He wanted for force Tony to believe him, to make him see that Steve had let him down so he could beg forgiveness and then, maybe, move on from there. But he also wanted to avoid starting another argument, like they had before the capture, and he was pretty sure that that was the only way their current conversation was headed. Instead, he let out a breath and said, “What did you want to tell me?”
Tony snorted softly, then grimaced. “Actually… same thing.”
“Same thing?” Steve asked blankly.
“Apologize,” Tony said, his voice dropping in tone in what Steve now recognized as embarrassment.
“For what?” Steve asked. Now he felt totally lost.
“Oh, let’s see,” Tony said, raising his good hand, the one not encased in a thick white cast, and counting off on his fingers, “being a selfish dick at the start of all this, being a selfish dick in the middle, and not seeing that Hydra was controlling you and nearly getting us both turned into mindless Hydra slaves for the rest of our lives.” He was panting slightly when he stopped, his face tightening in a grimace.
“Tony, you saved us,” Steve said.
“I got lucky. You kicked ass.”
Steve hung his head, feeling an entirely new headache building. “If it wasn’t for you we’d both still be in that base.”
“All right, fine,” Tony grumbled, then looked down at the pale blue blanket covering his chest and spoke to it instead. “Whatever. I also wanted to…to tell you you can forget what I said.”
“About the shell—post-traumatic stress?” Steve asked. That had been Tony’s big secret, after all, the one thing he hadn’t wanted Steve to know.
Tony winced. “Shit. I forgot about that.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I don’t think any less of you,” Steve said, so enthusiastically that Tony did a double take. “If anything, I’m impressed again. Moving back to New York, putting on the armor again… that takes a lot of strength. I’m proud of you, Tony.”
“Uh…thanks,” Tony said awkwardly. His chin had crept back down to his chest again. “Nobody else is.” His eyes traveled briefly toward the door where Pepper had left. Then he cleared his throat. “But that’s not what I meant.”
Steve’s brow furrowed, partly at the idea that anyone in Tony’s life wouldn’t appreciate what the struggle Tony had gone through, was going through, and partly in confusion at what Tony had just said. “What did you mean?”
“I meant. About. You and me,” Tony said. He sounded like he was forcing the words out from behind some great barrier. “The part where I said I wanted to be… you know… friends and… more.”
Steve straightened, another frown turning the corners of his lips down. After assuming for so many months that Tony thought him a relic hardly worth his time, he’d been glad to hear Tony admit that he saw something more for them. He liked Tony, too, after all. He reached out and rested a hand on Tony’s good arm, hoping to show how he felt through the simple touch.
Tony flinched away, then grimaced when Steve started to pull his hand back. “No, no, it’s okay,” he said, and waited for Steve to tentatively put his hand back before adding, “Still can’t help it.”
“Are you sure?” Steve asked, not wanting to do anything that might make him uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “It… helps.”
Steve nodded, and waited for Tony to go on.
“Look, uh. All I wanted to say is, I know you don’t like me much, and you don’t really want to be my friend. Being on the team together, that’s all I need. Want. Really. I promise I won’t try to be your BFF or, or hit on you, or anything else. So if you don’t make it weird I won’t make it weird and we can just go back to the way things were and you can forget I ever said anything. Okay?”
Steve blinked. The only think he could think to ask was, “Why do you think I don’t want to be your friend?”
Tony’s jaw clenched. “You made that pretty clear, Cap.”
Steve thought back to that chaotic day on the Helicarrier. He’d been annoyed at Stark, the emotion heightened by the Tesseract’s power. But Stark had given as good as he’d gotten and it had never occurred to Steve—after he’d seen what Stark was really made of, after the battle and his unadulterated joy at Tony having survived—that Tony might have taken his comments to heart.
“Tony,” he said, a short sigh later. “I do like you. And I do want to be friends.”
“Right. Sure you do,” Tony said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. Or as though it wasn’t quite what he wanted.
“What is it?” Steve asked. A small, sick part of him missed how easy it had been to talk to Tony on the truth serum, when he hadn’t had to second guess everything Tony said.
Tony was squinting at him. “You actually…mean it.”
“Of course. What did you think I’ve been trying to do?” Steve asked. “Every time I’ve made an effort, you’ve pushed me away or started a fight.”
It was Tony’s turn to look nonplussed, as if this had never occurred to him. He blinked rapidly and said in a small voice, “Oh.”
Still a little puzzled, Steve said, “Can we put that behind us?” He paused, a little afraid to move forward when he wasn’t entirely sure what twenty-first century customs dictated. But he was fairly sure that Tony had implied what Steve thought he implied. It still amazed him how those types of inclinations, the one Steve had always suppressed out of necessity. He cleared his throat and smiled softly. “I really do want to get to know you better. A lot better. As friends or…more. If you’d like that. I think you’re swell, Tony.”
After all they’d been through, it was an incredible understatement, but several emotions seemed to pass over Tony’s face in the space of a second nonetheless—disbelief, amusement, unmistakable hope. His expression settled into one of doubt. “You really mean it.”
“We could see if there’s any of that truth serum left over,” Steve said.
Tony’s eyes narrowed for a few seconds before he let out a short huff of a laugh, winced, then seemed to relax. “Funny.”
Steve smiled wider, moving his hand down Tony’s arm so that he was clasping Tony’s hand in his own. Tony stared at it like he wasn’t sure what had just happened, but his fingers tightened slightly around Steve’s anyway. Steve waited for him to meet his eyes again before saying, “I mean it.”
Tony nodded slightly, his eyes still wide.
Steve squeezed his hand again and leaned forward to press a chaste kiss against his forehead. Tony let out a soft snort through his nose, looking for all the world like he was fighting tears.
Still smiling, Steve said, “I think we should start by going over the plans for the Avengers complex again. We still have to decide about that bar, you know.”
For a moment Tony was silent and Steve was worried that bringing up the source of their earlier argument had been a bad idea, but as he’d hoped it seemed instead to shake Tony out of his shock. Tony finally returned his smile with a watery one of his own. “Thanks,” he said simply.
“You should get some rest,” Steve said. “I can stay, if you’d like.”
Tony’s eyes met his, and another bit of understanding seemed to pass over him. His fingers tightened around Steve’s again, his thumb brushing over Steve’s as if in memory of a gentle touch smoothing out his hair.
“Yeah,” Tony said, his voice still hoarse and full of unspoken emotion and disbelief. “Yeah, that’d be… nice. If you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” Steve said, smiling gently at Tony again. It was true that he hadn’t slept in a few days himself, but a few hours more was nothing. Not when Tony was lying there so vulnerable, and looking up at him like that. “It’s the least I can do.”
Tony closed his eyes, and before long, his breathing had slowed and his hand slackened in Steve’s. Steve watched him sleep, his mind wandering back to their night in captivity and how impossible it had seemed to make things right then. They still had a long way to go, there was no doubt—Steve would never forgive himself for what he had done, and what he’d failed to do, and whether Tony blamed him or not they had a lot of rebuilding to do. But for perhaps the first time since that fateful day on the helicarrier, things were looking up.